From the trailer for The Golden Compass,  I was someone concerned with the liberties the screenplay had taken.  I was pleasantly surprised that the movie actually followed the book pretty well, and the plot changes that were most noticeable actually did seem like improvements.  The film downplayed (but did not eliminate) the idea that the Magisterium is a religious organization, and made an agent of the Magisterium directly responsible for an attempted poisoning early in the film.  The ending of the novel was omitted from the film, however, presumably in order to end on a more positive note.

The biggest problem with the film is that it is too short; there is a great deal of action in the novel and it has been packed into less than two hours, resulting in a frenetic pace.  I think it would have been much better if the running length was two and a half or even three hours.

It will be very interesting to see the film treatments of the middle and final novels if they are made.  It would be impossible to make a faithful treatment of the third novel while eliminating the religious nature of the Magisterium.

On the whole, I thought it was a good film, but recommend reading the novel before watching it.  I’ll want to see the extras on the DVD or Blu-Ray when it is released in May.

In the mean time, I purchased two of Wilson’s earlier novels, The Chronoliths and Blind Lake, Hugo Award nominees in 2002 and 2004. I’m astonished that The Chronoliths is already out of print. I just finished reading the Blind Lake, and while the story is very different from Spin, it was every bit as hard to put down, and created the same sense of awe.

In Blind Lake, a government research facility dedicated to “New Astronomy” is suddenly quarantined, with no explanation to the researchers or the journalists that happened to be there. Food is delivered weekly by autonomous trucks, but no contact with the outside world is allowed, and those that attempt to leave are killed by military drones.

About a quarter of the way into the novel, I thought I had a good guess as to the reason for the quarantine, but I was completely mistaken. Anti-spoiler ahead.

The Blind Lake facility and its sister facility Crossbank use O/BEC computers, quantum computers that run self-replicating evolving software. They were tasked with extracting weak signals from the noise of failing space telescopes examining planets in nearby star systems. Although the systems occasionally have hiccups, they generally do a remarkable job, especially when they keep working even though the telemetry from the telescopes completely fails.

My immediate conclusion was that if the O/BECs can be trained to use quantum effects to provide images of life forms on planets fifty light years distant, they could also be trained to provide images of things right here on earth. Train an O/BEC with a spy sat pointed at a particular target. Once it has locked in, you don’t need the spy sat any more, and you can get the O/BEC to focus on a particular person and follow them around.

Like the problem with Asimov’s “chronoscope” in his short story “The Dead Past”, it would destroy our notions of privacy, especially as technology advances bring the size and cost of an O/BEC down from something found only at government research labs to something you can buy at the shop around the corner for $499.95.

There are also charts sorted by genre, which show a high correlation between genre and SAT scores, albeit with some outliers.

The contents of the ebook seem OK, other than that it doesn’t include the 27th Amendment. But the info page was very interesting:

(click photo for larger version; red highlighting and photo copyright notice added)

They categorized the Constitution as fiction!  I guess that’s not too surprising, as that’s how the current U.S. administration views it.

Over one million advance orders have already been placed for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as readers young and old tune in to find out details of the tragic demise of the young warlock at the hands of a gang of muggles.

Sorry, didn’t mean to give away the ending.

the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices, and follies, and also our fears.

I was “reading” it on a audio book while driving, and I pulled over to back up the CD and make sure I heard it correctly. This observation, I thought, describes the phenomenon so common in decisions by governmental officials to bend logic and law to serve a particular desired end. It is most obvious in judicial decisions where the trail of reasoning from law to decision often seems strained, as though the jurist had worked backwards from the desired decision to select a the law that could most easily be twisted to fit the outcome.

This also happens when legislators and executives abuse their power, but I’m more disturbed when jurists do it (especially the good ol’ Ninth Circuit) because we seem to have culturally accepted courts as the most powerful wielders of governmental authority. In the case of the SCOTUS, the power is that of an absolute monarch. Of course, one could argue back, an absolute monarch is not limited by the law. Yet, from my strict constructionist POV, courts that use reason to justify desired ends are not terribly limited.